July Update

Sam Newman

— 2 min read

Yes, another monthly newsletter which has just arrived before the end of the month, assuming you aren't one of my antipodean readers (so sorry for those of you in New Zealand and Australia, who are instead getting this in August).

Book Progress

The chapter on message brokers is finally available over at O'Reilly. The delay here is entirely on me, but I'm happy it's now out and would love some feedback. The chapter on progressive collapse will be complete within a week or so, then handed over to my lovely editor and tech reviewers. The hope is that that particular chapter will arrive for readers towards the end of August.

I've also done some planning around a re-jigged table of contents, and will share the changes there in the next newsletter update.

Things I Have Found

A bit of a focus on AI in the context of software development this month, largely due to doing some research for clients:

  • The "S" in MCP stands for security. A great overview of the extent to which security has been totally overlooked in the initial rollout of MCP. Leaving security till later has always gone well, right?
  • Luckily, this is being looked at, with an optional Authorization specification now published for the MCP specification. Thanks to Matt Ledger for sharing this one with me. Even if fully adopted, this is far from the end of the security related headaches in the context of MCP I think. But it's at least a good start
  • Some of my security concerns are mollified when vendors create MCP servers for their own tools. With this in mind it's great to see Honeycomb developing their own MCP server, which is now in beta.
  • I don't tend to listen to tech podcasts, but glad I made an exception for this episode of Changelog and Friends, where Abi Noda shared the data that DX has gathered on the benefits of AI-assisted code authoring. Turns out developers are around 10% more productive, but that this doesn't translate to a matching improvement in code shipped to production. It's early days for DX's data gathering, but along with DORA they remain the gold standard for data on software development practices. It will be interesting to see what they share as their own models are adapted to analyze the impact of AI on software development as the tools themselves improve.

Forthcoming Events

A few more things are now "live", so I can share the majority of my upcoming talks and public workshops for the rest of 2025:

  • GOTO Copenhagen, September 29th - October 3rd. There are just a few spots left for the two public workshops I am doing at this event. I'll be running a one day workshop on microservice communication, and another on resilient distributed systems.
  • API Days India, October 8th - 9th. As well as a talk, I will be delivering a one day workshop on October 10th on resilient distributed systems (details on that will go live soon)
  • Techorama NL, October 27th - 29th. Another talk and a chance to catch my workshop on resilient distributed systems.
  • Trifork Masterclass, Amsterdam, October 30th - 31st. This will be the last chance to attend my public two day microservices workshop in 2025.
  • LeadDev Berlin, November 3rd - 4th. The schedule isn't yet live, but I will be delivering a talk on the nature of resiliency.
  • MQ Summit, November 5th - 6th. I'll be delivering a keynote on the nature of meaning, and specifically what asynchronous actually means.
  • Architecture Conference Tokyo, November 20th - 21st. What's better than one keynote from me? How about two! Really looking forward to what will be my first trip to Japan. I will also be delivering a workshop while in Tokyo, details TBC. The website for the 2025 edition isn't yet live, but you can get more details here: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000150.000045379.html.

That's all for now, see you next month!

Read more